Silicon Valley event promotes women in engineering

The fourth annual Dare 2B Digital event on the Oracle campus in Silicon Valley aims to encourage middle and high school girls to consider high tech careers.

SAN JOSE, Calif. –Bettina Chen and Alice Brooks were engineering students at Stanford when they had an idea for a do-it-yourself dollhouse kit aimed at sparking for other girls an interest in design. With a little help from Kickstarter, Roominate became a reality.

The duo is slated to speak at the fourth annual Dare 2B Digitalon the Oracle campus in Silicon Valley on Saturday, Feb. 9. Like Roominate, the event is geared at encouraging girls to consider high tech careers.

The day includes a panel discussion with established tech executives such as Sue Graham Johnston, vice president of product lifecycle and technology at Oracle and Marie Tahir, vice president of design at eBay Marketplaces. Alina Cioletti, an exercise science major and avid kart racer at Ashland University will share her plans to merge racing and academics.

A wide swath of Silicon Valley companies will host workshops aimed at girls in middle and high school. For example, Pixar will talk about technical roles in digital animation, Intel will discuss cyber safety and Mozilla and Oracle will sponsor sessions on programming. Workshops aimed at parents include sessions on how to find and pay for good science, technology engineering and math programs.

“Events like Dare 2B Digital help encourage young women to create, design and build new products and technologies that will positively impact the future,” said Alison Derbenwick Miller, vice president of the Oracle Academy, one of the event hosts.

“Dare 2B Digital is an incubator of dreams and possibilities, matching girls who think big with mentors and resources to create, invent and achieve the incredible,” said Ruth Stergiou, chief executive officer of Invent Your Future Foundation and founder of the event.

In a time when, according to the trade press, few US students want to go into engineeering, one wonders why events such as this one are aimed just at girls?
Interesting about the doll house. Turns out, when my brother and I were about 5 years old, dad got us a doll house. We couldn't care less about dolls, but the intent of the doll house was to rig up battery operated lighting for each of the rooms. And it was a lot of fun.